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So I hit a snag with the Late 2012 iMac and my imaging process. My instadmg created 10.8.2 image will not boot on it, they puke grey circle with a slash. I found that if I copied /Macintosh HD/System/CoreServices/platformsupport.plist from one of the stock systems to my post image systems it boots up and runs but it also looks like it encounters some peculiarities relating to Software Updates. My test machine pulled down 10.8.2 again and installed it over again but now when I go to Software Updates it claims the system isn’t connected to the internet. Weird, I’m writing this post through the active net connection… I assume this will be fixed with 10.8.3 as it will include the new Late 2012 iMac hardware changes that haven’t been propagated to the normal 10.8.2 updates.

So I guess I’m stuck creating a new image from one of the stock Late 2012 iMacs. For my own benefit I’m going to document the changes I make in the gui.

System Preference Changes

Run Updates

Security & Privacy

Allow Applications downloaded from: Anywhere

Sharing:

Computer Name

Remote login

Remote Management

Users & Groups

Disable Guest access to sharing

Add java via terminal

java -version

That’s all

I like thin images and layering on packages later so I can update them little by little instead of cracking open and remaking a huge image. I have a few environments where an image with everything could be a 500gb deployment… In interest of sanity and disk space thin works for me.

A lot of these settings I can distribute via scripts but I like to be sure they’re set. Paranoid? Maybe…

Symptoms: Upon launching Adobe CS6 Photoshop 13.0.3 that was installed and updated via packages created with Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition 3.1(AAMEE) on Mac systems it starts the selected Photoshop which will bounce in the dock but then starts Adobe Application Manager(AAM) and exits the app. Then Photoshop is launched again and AAM exits. This continues in a loop that repeats indefinitely until interrupted by a logging out or killing the processes. During this loop the UI will constantly shift focus making direct interactions with the machine difficult.

My personal story with this problem: I believe there is a countdown expiration that occurs prior as these symptoms were not immediately evident upon testing the patch. I actually approved and deployed the patch after testing it on a few machines for a few days. It ran fine in the wild for about ~3 weeks on the end user devices before these symptoms exhibited themselves on a handful of our lab machines. While I was troubleshooting what I believed to be an isolated handful of machines onsite I noticed that a few Mac systems that were able to run Photoshop, suddenly upon exiting and re-opening the app started to exhibit the same problem over a few hours. At the time my thought was ” Ack! Its spreading! Adobe what did you do!” and I began sweating… as I had no idea what was happening. Then came the frantic google searches and the comforting realization that I wasn’t alone and that there was actually already a fix available…. “Phew!”

The Fix: Install latest patches from Adobe for all products(incl. Photoshop 13.0.4 and reserialize the install after ensuring the devices can reach Adobe and VeriSign to reserialize the software.

Steps I took to get this under control:

Create a new updates package in AAMEE that includes Photoshop 13.0.4

Deploy the updates to machines that have Photoshop 13.0.3

Create a package that will reserialize installed CS6 products. Thanks to Greg Neagle for makereserializationpkg.

Test the packages on machines exhibiting the problems while authenticated to allow it to talk to Adobe and VeriSign.

Confer with my network engineer colleagues to ensure that the machines can talk unimpeded to Adobe and VeriSign for serial number verification and activation without authentication to our network.

Deploy the reserialization package

So far I have deployed this to 60 of the affected devices happily the numerous other Mac systems hadn’t gotten patched yet.

I did find a handful of the Mac systems couldn’t be patched. They gave an error message stating something to the effect of the installation failed please contact Adobe for direction. I did not contact Adobe instead I tried the uninstall tool in /Applications/Utilities/Adobe Installers, which stated there were no installations of CS6. Then I tried the installation “CS Cleaner Tool”, which failed similarly. Next I manually removed all CS6 apps from /Applications. I then deleted items from /Applications/Utilities/ that seemed pertinent to CS6. I then backed up and removed /Library/Application Support/Adobe. I then reinstalled CS6, the patches, and ran the serialization pkg. I found that removing /Library/Application Support/Adobe broke CS5 licensing, and Lightroom licensing but re-entering their serial number got them back on track. Leaving /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Adobe alone did not seem to affect re-installation or patching thankfully.

So far it hasn’t relapsed as some have seen on their Macs. I’ll update this if any snags present themselves.

Recently it was brought to my attention that one of our lab machines running Windows 7 and Faronics Deepfreeze was stuck in a reboot loop. Upon looking at it I found that it was displaying the normal windows start up logo with a black background and then going into updates. At the end of the updates it would reboot and start the process all over again.

After a little research I found a post that mentioned renaming the c:\windows\winsxs\pending.xml to prevent the system from attempting to apply updates. I booted the system into System Recovery and selected command prompt and renamed the file. I then rebooted and it worked in-so-far as allowing the machine to boot up such that I could login and thaw it.

I found however that the machine was no longer able to patch through Windows Update. I re-installed Win 7 SP1 manually which gave an error message. Despite the error it rebooted and began patching normally. Saved me a little time over formatting and re-deploying the OS and all the applications.

Hey this is my first post. Glad to know I have a place to gather and publish some ideas about what I am doing for Ohio State. This blog will likely digress into terse collections of links and documentation of things I’ve been asked to implement in my environment. I make no promises and give no guarantees. Cheers,

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